:: crapweasel ::
the official blog of
Dave Tompkins

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Since all the cool kids are doing their celebrity look-alikes at myheritage.com, I thought I'd try it out. The result was so funny I had to post it, because... well... Nobody puts baby in the corner! Seriously... my top two matches are best known for their on-screen dance moves and they have both studied Scientology. Awesome.

I've created a new website for my Movie Rating Database that has most of the movies I've ever seen and a rating from 1-10. I'm generally happy with the website, but I'm always looking for feedback and suggestions so if you have some, let me know. As for feedback on the ratings themselves, if you think I've rated a movie too highly I don't want to hear about it, but if you think I've rated a movie too low then let me know why you liked it so much or why I didn't "get it". Also, if I haven't seen one of your favourites, let me know because I'm always looking for new hidden gems.

If you want to know how/why I did it, read on: If you use the IMDb frequently, you're probably seen the changes to the look & feel: I know some people fear change, but I don't mind the changes and it's now easier & faster to enter your own movie ratings. A friend of mine had started rating every movie he had ever seen, and he inspired me... so when I got sick a couple of weeks ago I decided to lie in bed and rate the thousands of movies I've seen over the years. I then spent an afternoon procrastinating on my "real work" and made up the website. Basically, it's an automated script that downloads my ratings from IMDb and then generates some pretty web pages. There are still some additional features I'd like to add (statistics, genres) but I'll leave that for another afternoon of procrastination.

This past Saturday was the feast of St. Patrick, and to celebrate I stood outside a bar for several hours before I gave up and decided to go to a house party. I didn't know a lot of people at the party, but there was a fun DJ and a lot of alcohol and I was having a pretty good time -- until I got repeatedly punched in the head. The specific details of exactly why the juiced-up steroid jerk was punching me in the head are foggy at best. One popular theory was that I called him a juiced-up steroid jerk, but the general consensus was that I was generally in the wrong place at the wrong time and said the wrong thing to the wrong guy. I was told that he had previously tried to start a fight with other people at the party, but either they hadn't met his punching bag criteria or he hadn't consumed enough alcohol yet. It started with a punch in the face in the kitchen and I backpedaled to the living room where it ended with me sitting on the couch protecting my head with my arms while he was standing over me repeatedly punching me in the head. I'm told that he looked ridiculous punching this guy who wasn't fighting back at all. I estimate he got a good 12-18 blows in. I don't have a lot of visible marks -- my hands and arms took the brunt of it and are bruised -- and my nose & forehead are tender to the touch -- but I survived. To put a positive spin on it: This past Thursday my PhD supervisor gave me a metaphorical kick in the ass to get more work done on my thesis, and so I'll interpret this event as the universe trying to reinforce the message by punching me in the head.

Faithful readers may recall my previous post from eight months ago on how I was going to embark on my Dancin' Dave's All-RedHot Diet. Well, I think the pictures illustrate it well -- I've lost 80 pounds and 10 inches off of my waist. While I did consume a lot of Frank's RedHot (about a litre a month) I was obviously eating other things too. I'm not going to go into the details of my diet in this post -- I'll eventually set up another website with my tips -- probably at the one year marker (this Canada Day). The purpose of this post is to celebrate that I have now officially moved from the obese category to the overweight category according to the Body Mass Index (BMI). Note that when I started this diet (at ~290 pounds) I was categorised as morbidly obese, so while it may sound odd to celebrate being overweight it really is quite an achievement. Also, I think it's absolutely fascinating that at the same time I switched BMI categories (obese -> overweight), I've also switched shirt sizes (XL -> L) which is an odd observation on the clothing industry.